


So This Is Where I Leave You

by QueenTheatrics



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Amy Santiago Loves Jake Peralta, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Distance, F/M, Happy Ending, Sadness, Witness Protection, christ this is dramatic, how do you tag, jake loves her too, season 4, they miss each other, theyre sad about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:25:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8449747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenTheatrics/pseuds/QueenTheatrics
Summary: Jake goes into witness protection. Amy watches him go. The next six months are hard for them both. 
Basically just an angsty as hell little glimpse of what might have happened in those six months.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I thought up the title first and the rest of the fic is the result. Amy's part is better than Jake's. 
> 
> Season four is a masterpiece.

#### JAKE

Their goodbye is painfully short, and they part feeling the weight of unsaid words pressing heavy on their shoulders. Amy walks away and doesn't look back, her shoulders shaking with tears, and Jake, watching from afar, doesn't turn his back on her until she's out of his sight. Holt stands next to Jake, quiet and solemn, and Jake tries to school himself, to pull himself together, because at least he got to say goodbye to Amy, at least he had been with her every day beforehand. Holt's husband is halfway across the planet. Holt hasn't seen his husband in nine months. Holt's husband will leave an empty home in Paris and return to an empty home in Brooklyn. The thought makes Jake feel queasy. Suddenly, a strong hand clasps his shoulder and he looks up into his mentor's dark, unreadable eyes. Except, this time, those eyes are filled with tears. They leave together, and say nothing on the long drive to Florida.

Their new homes - Greg and Larry's new homes - are small and yellow and ugly as sin. They share a fence, but that is all, and Jake is suddenly very aware, when the front door closes behind him, that that fence is the only thing connecting Greg to Larry. He feels very alone, in that moment. 

He is okay for the first two weeks. A little subdued, maybe, a little lost, but mostly okay. But then the realisation that they're here, they're in Florida for the long haul, hits him, and he breaks. 

Jake stocks his fridge with beer and watches bad daytime television. He eats wet burritos and cries in the shower. He gets frosted tips and cuts the sleeves off all his tshirts. He wears flip flops. Holt can only watch from afar as Jake bottoms out, and it takes everything he has not to say, "To hell with you, Estelle!" and abandon his walking group to comfort the poor manchild he can see through the window eating ice cream from the tub.

Jake's soul, like his life, is a constant whirlwind of action. He doesn't know the definition of middle ground, always caught between going a hundred miles an hour or getting ready to go once again. So to be stuck in a swamp, told to sit tight, to do nothing... It's like he's been shackled at the wrists with cuffs on way too tight. He's one bad game show away from gnawing his hand off to escape.

He feels untethered, like a ship caught in a storm. His stomach lurches, seasick, every time he steps outside into the humid Florida air. One day, with his skin tingling like a thousand tiny pinpricks, he jumps on his quad and speeds down the road, skidding and screeching whenever he tries to brake. 

Somehow, unthinkingly, he ends up on the way to Disney World, but changes his mind when he gets to the turnoff and turns around. He's halfway home before he turns himself back, and when he arrives, he forces himself through the gates. Disney World isn't the worst place to be solo, but it make him think a lot of home. He mostly just sits on benches and eats cotton candy, and rides Space Mountain enough times to feel sick. 

He doesn't go back to the park the next day. When he gets back home, just past midnight, he locks his door and leans against it, feeling his frosted tips knocking against the wood. His stomach is still swooping, but at least now he can tell himself it's from the ride. 

The months drag in, and slowly he gets used to breathing air thick as treacle, to living quietly, aimlessly, to crying himself to sleep at night in a bed too big for one. He begins to wonder if he'll ever get home, but thoughts like that are worse than any nightmare his anxious mind plagues him with. The nightmares get worse, anyway. The day before their anniversary, he doesn't sleep through the night. The sound of the air conditioner sounds like a monster, but turn it off and he feels like he's drowning. He is trapped in limbo, somewhere between overworked and under stimulated, and he's tired, constantly, to the bone. But no matter what he does, it's well into the mornings before he can fall asleep.

There are days, difficult days, when Jake considers giving it all up for the chance to speak to Amy for just five minutes. Her voice is in his head, always, because for the longest time she's been about eighty percent of his impulse control, and the urge to contact her is only stemmed by that little nagging voice and the difficulty achieving that task would pose. Marshall took his laptop. Amy kept his phone. The only belongings he has were given to him on arrival. Jake Peralta has been erased like footprints by the tide, leaving an impression in memory alone. Calling Amy would pose a significant problem. Difficult, but not impossible.  
The Marshall doesn't know he has Amy's number memorised.  
There's a phone at the quad shop that just kind of sits around. It never gets used and never rings, and Jake is pretty convinced at this point that his coworkers think it's just there for decoration. It taunts him every time he looks at it. He kind of wants to smash it. The word 'indefinitely' swirls around in his head like a tornado.

But he resists. He thinks about disappointing Holt, about endangering Holt, about endangering himself. He thinks that Amy would be annoyed if he got himself killed in Florida, of all places. Days drag on with nothing to fill them but the unavoidable void of him own thoughts. 

And just as his resolve is about to break, Figgis arrives in all his glory, and Jake springs into action. When he gets going he is Newton's third law, and nothing, nigh an equal or greater force, will stop him. That equal force has always been Amy, and she's there with soothing hands and a smile like moonlight to bring him back down to earth. She kisses him hard, like she means it. God, he's missed her like oxygen.

#### AMY

Amy works, and then she works harder, and it's only when she blinks and the weak dawn sunlight is streaming through the windows that she realises this, this life of work and nothing more, is unsustainable. The precinct is quiet without him, without them both, and clean like she's never seen it. She almost finds herself missing the mice and the ants and the maggots, and that's when she knows she needs to leave. Terry is just coming in as she's going, and the concern on his face makes her well up, but she viscously swallows the lump in her throat and pushes the button for the elevator, because she won't cry in front of Terry, or Charles, or Rosa. Amy Santiago is steel. 

And going home is like coming up for air, but there's still water in her lungs and a burn in her chest, because she's been treading water for so long waiting to reach the shore. Her apartment - their apartment, she thinks, looking forlornly at the boxes of his things stacked around her living room - is a safe haven marred by an absence she feels like a lost limb. The phantom pain is acute, enduring, constant. Amy aches with it. 

She reaches into her bag and pulls out the files she stashed in there earlier which really, really, shouldn't have left the precinct. Jake may be gone but he's still a bad influence on her, and there's something oddly comforting in that. With files in one hand and his favourite takeout in the other, she searches the archives for evidence to take down Figgis. 

Hours go by like rigid, unwavering clockwork, and her eyes begin to sting long before she's ready to stop looking. Her hair falls out of its slick ponytail, piece by piece; the sun sets behind her head, casting the room into long, whisper-dark shadow. She unravels like a ball of twine with no one there to wind her back up again. 

She searches the transcripts of her conversations in prison, and reading back the ridiculous things she said and did makes her laugh a laugh that lasts all too short before it's a choked off sob. She thinks of what her father told her, back when she first started getting panic attacks, and breathes, trembling, concentrating on the way counting her numbers makes her feel, like a wave of calm is washing over her in cool, engulfing certainty. Amy Santiago is waves on a shore. 

Later, much later, when the files are away and she has only the darkness to hide in, she searches social media for the tiniest hint of him, hoping fiercely that she'll see him and and even more ardently that she won't. She can't even tell herself it's all for the case. The Google alert for Florida has nothing to do with Figgis and everything to do with the fact that she's selfish and lonely and he's always been the best of her. 

When she comes in the next day, Terry takes one look at her and makes her take a week off. He practically pushes her towards the door and tells her to get some sleep and not think about work, for once in her life. But all Amy has is work and missing Jake, and she's worried that if she removes one she'll collapse like a house of cards. 

She goes home and turns on some music and slowly begins unpacking the boxes of his things, and her apartment feels bigger, somehow, when she's done. His essence is everywhere, from the two and a half pots in the kitchen to the Wolverine bedsheets now in residence in the hamper. It fills her with warmth, and then deathly cold, like she's been frozen from her heart outwards. His influence may be here, his heart and soul and everything he holds dear, but he is not. She can search his belongings for something to replace him, but she'll come up blank every time. 

And she can hear her heartbeat in her ears because at the end of the day, he's still gone, she still loves him, and the only thing she is searching is her soul. 

The fierce stormy seas of summer turn into the still waters of autumn. Boyle's son calls her Aunt Amy. She gets her hair cut and doesn't like it, so resigns herself to a ponytail until it grows out. No one notices. 

She looks up, suddenly, and six months have passed. She's celebrated their anniversary alone. She's celebrated both their birthdays by herself, a candle in a cupcake, blown out in a hushed whisper of a breath. The gaping wound he left in her is a dull ache, her nerve endings fried to the point of no return. Her heart beats a rhythm in 2/2 time to the sound his absence makes in her soul. 

Amy dreams. The plot of the dreams vary, but the content remains largely the same. It's him, always him, just out of her reach, his hands slipping away from hers like smoke between her fingers. She refuses to be a slave to sleeping pills so she starts drinking herbal tea. She hates them all with a burning passion. She takes up smoking again, then stops. It is an exercise in futility. Amy Santiago is Sisyphus and his infamous boulder. 

Eventually, she gets him back. It's awkward at first, down in Florida, because six months is a long time, and they're off balance, out of sync, until she shoots him in the leg and resets their systems. She kisses him in the back of an ambulance with emergency lights flashing behind their heads, and she wonders if she'll ever see another moment as perfect as this.  
She loves him more and more with every breath, unchangingly.

By the time they get back to Brooklyn, it's the next day, and the sun is high in the sky and shining bright in their faces. She squints at it, kind of annoyed, and there isn't enough coffee in the world to make the beaming rays seem less obnoxious. But night falls, as it often does, and they retreat to bed - their bed - and for the first time in six months, she feels the knot of anxiety in her chest unravel.  
She falls asleep to Jake's breathing and the sound of the city drifting in through her open window.

 


End file.
